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It is curious that as the security and rights of social citizenship were weakened in the older industrialized and de-industrializing parts of the world, with the decline of the social welfare state, the issue of cultural citizenship rose up the agendas of public and academic debate. To some extent this reflects how issues that were once considered ‘social’ have come increasingly to be thought of as ‘cultural’. Questions of identity and a sense of belonging appear to have superseded questions of material entitlement in much social and cultural theory as well as in cultural politics. While, in the USA, to take the most notable example, public spending on urban programmes and welfare was slashed (Davis, 1993a, ...